Application of chitosan-based wound dressings in local treatment of parenchymal organ wounds: a preclinical experimental study

Background. Injuries of various origins with damage to parenchymal organs remain one of the urgent issues of emergency surgery, despite all the achievements of medical science of the first quarter of the XXI century. One way to improve the quality of treatment for patients with this pathology consists in developing new wound dressings or modifying the properties of existing ones. Hemostatic efficacy is claimed to be one of the main requirements for such dressings.Objective. To perform a comparative analysis of the efficacy of the developed biodegradable wound dressings based on chitosan in the treatment of experimental wounds of parenchymal organs.Methods. The study involved laboratory animals (male rabbits weighing 2900 ± 150 g) to form experimental wounds of parenchymatous organs. The methodology involved wounding the liver via internal method, with the creation of a tissue defect of a given volume, or forming a linear incised wound with fixed parameters followed by application of a developed wound dressing. In the control group of animals, a collagen hemostatic sponge was used as a wound dressing. The animals used in the experiment were kept in accordance with GOST 33044-2014 “Principles of good laboratory practice”. The experiment involved studying the properties of two samples of wound dressings developed on the basis of modified Chitosan Soft (Ch-S) and Chitosan Hard (Ch-H) chitosan, having different properties due to their different structural parameters. The applied ultrasound control of the experimental wound area, with visualization of the samples of the investigated material in the process of biodegradation, enabled the features of the wound process to be studied in more detail. Statistical processing of the study results was carried out by methods of variational statistics, including the calculation of mean values (M), standard errors of mean values (± m). The criterion of the level of statistical significance considered a value of p